A fusion of IoT and health is about where luxury light maker Soraa’s entry into the consumer market lies, with its key feature being the ability to mimic natural sunlight, and filter out the sleep-harming blue light that most traditional lights, along with tons and tons of consumer electronics, blast in our faces on a day to day basis. The new bulb on the block is called Helia, and though the luxuriant luminant’s claim to fame is its ability to ape natural light and not interfere with vision or sleep patterns, the light possesses IoT features that go far beyond simply lighting up a room in the best way possible.
The light’s IoT chops begin with the ability to know your location, and thus the sunset and sunrise times. Based on those, it can filter out more and more blue light until there’s finally none left when bedtime rolls around. The lights can also communicate with each other via your home’s electrical lines, if you have more than one, and create clusters on a per-room or proximity basis. This allows the lights in a certain room to synchronize, all turning on or off at the same time and dimming or brightening in unison. With a special accessory called a Presence Smart SNAP, lights can be turned on or off based on when a room is empty in order to conserve power, and a special companion app can give you complete control over the whole thing, from the amount of blue light filtered at a given time to the brightness and color richness of the lights throughout your home. The lights also boast Amazon Alexa and IFTTT integration via a Cloud Connect accessory.
Soraa’s new Helia bulbs are set to hit the market sometime in Spring, with a base price of $50 a pop. If you want them to do more, the Cloud Connect accessory costs $50, while the Presence Smart SNAP, of which you’ll need one in each room or cluster, costs $30. While there are other blue light filtering bulbs out there, this would be the first one to boast any real smarts, or to change the amount filtered throughout the day dynamically.